New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

March 04, 2010

Creating AIP UniPHY, a Social Network for Professionals

Last
week we wrote about the importance of creating a 360-degree view FOR
customers of their information. The American Institute of Physics'
UniPHY portal does that and more. If you are a professional physicist,
one of the things you care about the most is your professional
reputation as exemplified by the seminal research you have published.
AIP provides each published author (their customers) with a view of all
their published papers. But UniPHY doesn’t stop there; AIP's published
authors can not only see their articles, they can see all their
co-authors' articles, and all the other experts who have published on
similar topics.

Further, API has taken a unique
approach to social networking—one that seems well-suited to the
behaviors and interests of their constituents: physicists, materials
scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, and others engaged in the
physical sciences. AIP has taken an existing implicit social
network—people who collaborate and publish research together—and made
it explicit.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from AIP’s experience launching and nurturing UniPHY:

• It pays to invest in creating a rigorous taxonomy.

• People care about people. People find each other much more fascinating than “things.”

• If people already have public personas and profiles, pulling that
information together and presenting it in an easy-to-use manner is not
likely to alienate them.

• Don’t underestimate customers’ pride of authorship and ownership.

• If you are in the publishing business, looking for new business
models, consider offering free value-added services on top of your paid
content.

• Be clear about which customer scenarios you’re designing for. If you
design around customers’ critical activities, you are much more likely
to be able to attract and grow a vibrant customer-centric ecosystem
that will increase the value of your business!